Suburbs around northern Sydney are undergoing some “hazard reduction backburning”, now that the weather has cooled down and there isn’t too much wind. The sky looks unreal. My XD card reader finally arrived for my inherited 2007 Olympus bridge camera , so I used its massive telephoto zoom to try some evening shots. Aside from setting a -1 exposure compensation, this is straight out of the camera without any colour tweaking. By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-04-16. Suburbs around ...

My best friend lost his Dad yesterday. Understandably he's extremely upset, and I feel awful for him. I never know what to do in these situations - "how are you doing?" just feels such a stupid thing to say. Like it's nowhere near enough. Of course he isn't doing well, you fucking idiot! His loss has brought about feelings of loss following the death of my own Dad. Who we lost back in 2008 to cancer, when he was 47. Watching him just wither away was heartbreaking. Especially at the age of 23...

The proof of work is the wrong analogy: finding hash collisions, while exponentially harder with N, is guaranteed to find, with enough work, some S so that H(S) satisfies N, so an asymmetry of resources used will see the side with more "work ability" eventually winning. But bugs are different: 1. Different LLMs executions take different branches, but eventually the possible branches based on the code possible states are saturated. 2. If we imagine sampling the model for a bug in a given...

Hello fine reader of my blog! This is a brief note to highlight that as of a couple of years ago I stopped cross-posting from my newsletter to this blog, so if you would like to receive new blog, ahem, newsletter posts, please resubscribe in your favorite feed reader using https://newsletter.dancohen.org/rss , or you can subscribe by email or other methods at https://newsletter.dancohen.org . Thanks! I have been actively posting on the newsletter and would appreciate the audience that has ...

Tucked in a tiny timed capsule against its wonky, worldly windows mesmerized the momentary Moonfarers at sweeping sights of Selene Creased by craters and crowning peaks melts and mountains molded in weeks amid barrages of ballistically laid beads lingered the landscape of Luna What the world could view is impact not as distant through the capsule crew For a world bent and battered showed that it wasn’t shattered that it was weathered, not withered trembled, not tamed or tattered Just like the ...

A Acemoglu2023 Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson: Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity . PublicAffairs, 2023, 978-1541702530. Achen2017 Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels: Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government . Princeton University Press, 2017, 978-1400888740. Adams1905 Samuel Hopkins Adams: The Great American Fraud . Collier, 1906. B Baldwin2014 Peter Baldwin: The Copyright Wars: Three Cen...

Light: it's the radiation we can see. The communications potential of light is obvious, and indeed, many of the earliest forms of long-distance communication relied on it: signal fires, semaphore, heliographs. You could say that we still make extensive use of light for communications today, in the form of fiber optics. Early on, some fiber users (such as AT&T) even preferred the term "lightguide," a nice analogy to the long-distance waveguides that Bell Laboratories had experimented with. The ...

inspired by zach lieberman inspired by zach lieberman inspired by zach lieberman zach lieberman

Using the repair-friendly Framework 13 laptop chassis, I've tested the low-end x86 option (a Ryzen AI 5 340 Mainboard ), the fastest RISC-V option ( DC-ROMA II ), and today I'm publishing results from the only Arm Mainboard, the MetaComputing AI PC , which has a 12-core Arm SoC and up to 32 GB of soldered-on RAM. My Framework 13 has run on x86, RISC-V, and now Arm, making it something of a 'Ship of Theseus'. Using the repair-friendly Framework 13 laptop chassis, I've tested the low-end...

WASHINGTON – (March 30, 2026) – Airbus U.S. Space & Defense, in partnership with Shield AI, L3Harris Technologies (NYSE: LHX), and Parry Labs, completed its fourth autonomous flight test period on the H145 Airbus helicopter and successfully integrated all four company’s technologies into a single aircraft together for the first time. The test flights, which took place at the Airbus facility in Grand Prairie, Texas, focused on refining the aircraft’s perception system to ensure it provi...

I realised that the thing that bothered me the most about that stupid tabs discussion was the shallowness. Vertical vs horizontal tabs in a browser is not a deep philosophical topic worth of major explorations, that goes without saying, but you can still approach it with some nuances. And that’s the main issue with most of modern discourse: everything is—or tries to be—some sort of hot-take. Because being reasonable is boring. Being reasonable and working through a topic doesn’t generate...

I attended the first Pragmatic Summit early this year, and while there host Gergely Orosz interviewed Kent Beck and myself on stage . The video runs for about half-an-hour. I always enjoy nattering with Kent like this, and Gergely pushed into some worthwhile topics. Given the timing, AI dominated the conversation - we compared it to earlier technology shifts, the experience of agile methods, the role of TDD, the danger of unhealthy performance metrics, and how to thrive in an AI-native in...

Why we need collaborative AI engineering Why we need collaborative AI engineering

Translating errors at layer boundaries so storage details don't leak into the handler or, worse, into client responses. Translating errors at layer boundaries so storage details don't leak into the handler or, worse, into client responses.

Whenever a new technology shows up, the conversation quickly splits into camps. There are the people who reject it outright, and there are the people who seem to adopt it with religious enthusiasm. For more than a year now, no topic has been more polarising than AI coding agents. What I keep noticing is that a lot of the criticism directed at these tools is perfectly legitimate, but it often comes from people without a meaningful amount of direct experience with them. They are not necessaril...

As I already mentioned in oh so many blog posts, I now live in a house, which opens totally new possibilities when doing astrophography. I no longer have to drive a long way just to get to the spot, and then spend hours either outside in the cold, or in a small shed. Now all I need is to carry out the equipment in the evening, do the setup and polar alignment when it gets acceptably dark, and then sit comfortably on the couch and control the session from the inside. Which means I can do much lon...

Evolutionary arms races — where one species is pitted against another, driving the evolution of new or more sophisticated weapons as each tries to gain the upper hand — are ubiquitous in nature. One of the oldest and fiercest battles has been waged for billions of years between bacteria and the viruses that infect them. This escalating warfare has selected for bacteriophage viruses (or “phages”)… Source Evolutionary arms races — where one species is pitted against another, driving...

At Oxford I focused my research and discussions on how we can use the tools of computational complexity to help us understand the power and limitations of machine learning. Last week I posted my paper How Does Machine Learning Manage Complexity? , a first step in this direction. Let me give a broad overview of the paper. Please refer to the paper for more technical details. Instead of focusing on the machine learning concepts like neural nets, transformers, etc., I wanted to abstract out a mode...

I’ve been messing around with local LLMs on my 3090 for a while now — I have a growing collection of Qwen models on D:\LLM that I probably should be embarrassed about. A few weeks ago I stumbled across David Noel Ng’s LLM Neuroanatomy blog posts, where he showed that you can take a pretrained transformer and literally just re-run some of its middle layers a second time at inference, no retraining needed, and get meaningfully better outputs. The D:\LLM folder. I should probably ...

We talk here sometimes about how to test SQL dialects with tools like TLP and PQS . One really nice property of those tools is that they let you treat the database like a blackbox. I'm tinkering with a little SQL planner to mess around with ideas and one feature I added very early was an explicit optimization fence operator that simply blocks any optimizations: In a query like this: SELECT * FROM ( SELECT a , b , c , d FROM foo , bar WHERE a = c ) WHERE b...

Weaver, seen from the Front , Vincent van Gogh, 1884 Something that’s been floating around in my head lately is the idea that I don’t know any truly good engineers who are also not good at at product design. Product design can roughly be designed as the contract between the creator and the user, where the contract is designed by a set of affordances, or actions that the product allows the user to take. This is all cribbed from Don Norman and The Beauty of Everyday Things . For...

Antarctic snow cruiser circa 1939, via Historyland . Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology. This week we look at whether the Strait of Hormuz is open yet, building code cost benefit analysis, Intel joining Terafab, sponge cities, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber. War in Iran A two-week ceasefire between the US and Iran was announced earl...

“Gandalf, my old friend, this will be a night to remember.” ― The Lord of the Rings The next three days of my journey, I've spent in and around Twizel. This region is called the Mackenzie Basin, which includes a few popular tourist spots. It's also where my friends from Germany now live, and I was excited to see them again after a long time! On my way to Twizel, I've made a few stops. First, I've checked out the Moeraki Boulders . Fortunately, it was only a short detour, as I ...